Wednesday, March 08, 2017

A Similarity Between Sexuality and Language

There are those who believe that traditional cultural expressions of sexuality are mere “social conventions”, as if these social conventions should be sloughed off by enlightened people.
Sexuality and traditional sexual social conventions have a similarity to language. Language begins in pure physiology with vocal chords, tongue, etc…, and ends in pure convention, with accents, slang, etc… Spanning the first part of the gap between physiology and culture is the basic human need to communicate with language, and the basic logic of language (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc...), and the human brain that is designed to link biology, logic, emotion and expression.
Spanning the second part of the gap, various languages and cultures organize the basic logic of language into different conventions of grammar, sounds and words. While languages are conventions in the way they organize the basic logic of language, they are not fungible any more than a motorist in the U.S can decide to drive on the left side of the road. Having all of these non-fungible things supporting it, language then has its more fungible social conventions of slang, accents, colloquialisms, evolving words, etc...
Sexuality also spans a bridge from pure biology to pure social convention, with a host of non-fungible aspects in between. Those who believe they are promoting “freedom” by removing sexual social conventions, do not respect this, which leads to the emotional and social equivalents of car crashes and train wrecks.

Wednesday, March 01, 2017

What's in a Word? The Long-Game Of the Sexual Left

Much of the Church has yet to fully comprehend Leftism as movement that is equal parts political, social, ideological, and spiritual. Each one of these four facets of Leftism compliments and reinforces the other three facets of Leftism.

Generally speaking, the Church is either under the influence of Leftist thinking, OR it understands the social and political symptoms of Leftism: sexual immorality, porn, divorce, abortion, the erosion of freedom to live openly as a Christian, etc... but not Leftism itself, as the unique evil in our age that is driving and encouraging those sins.

The Church understands the Biblical language of spiritual battle, but does not fully understand how Leftism has taken people's minds captive, as the spiritual battle of our time on the macro level, as the ideology that lies at the root of the existential crisis driving people into sexual immorality, as the defective moral compass directing people into spiritual death in the name of being politically correct.

The Church understands traditional Christian doctrine, which was provided to us by those who clarified it against the heresies of the past, but the church does not understand how to clarify the Gospel against the modern rival to the truth of Scripture that is Leftism, and the worship of Nature that is behind Leftism.

The Church has a lot to learn from those like Dennis Prager and other secular thinkers who have stared hard into the Left to understand, classify and categorize its dangers, particularly in the realm of the social, political and ideological. The Church also has a lot to offer those in the world who take Leftism seriously, by explaining how the Kingdom of God offers the only real, durable answer to Leftism, as the only thing that addresses every facet of Leftism including the spiritual facet. The Church will only be effective in ministering to people out of their Leftism when it first identifies Leftism as the reigning counterfeit idea of the age, and carefully clarifies the Kingdom of God against Leftism.

The essential fallacy of Leftist Christianity is this: because Jesus cared for the poor and was mindful of the outcast and downtrodden, any idea that is promoted in the name of helping the poor, downtrodden and outcast is what it means to be like Jesus, and to be Christian.
Jesus mission was to reconcile each individual with the Father, to call the individual to repent of sin and to enable his/her regeneration and sanctification. It was the context of personal repentance and reconciliation with the Father, and in the context of having utmost respect of the Law and the whole of Scriptures teaching, that Jesus modeled how we are to care to for the poor, in all of the ways that people can be poor, economically, spiritually, socially, etc...

By stripping away the repentance out of sin into reconciliation with the Father, and by extension, the whole counsel of Scripture, the Leftist prescription for one to be "Christ-Like" is to affirm someone in a state of gender unholiness, never calling them into repentance, since to promote the the Biblical idea of gender holiness with the intent of calling people to repentance is merely to promote stigma towards those on the margins, keeping them marginalized.

Words are such that they have whole ideas, philosophies and worldviews baked into them. A word itself is like a thesis encoded into letters, such that you must understand the idea to fully understand the meaning of the word, and uttering the word reinforces the idea that word exists to express.

The thesis that is "baked" into the terms "man" and "woman"/"men" and "women” is the Biblical binary of the God-created sexes of human male/female operating in the God-ordained genders of man/woman.  The idea encoded into the terms "man" and "woman" is that there is a universality to human sexuality: that men and women express a whole greater than the sum of their parts and that the differences between men and woman are durable and predictable across time, space and culture.  

The substance of the uniqueness expressed by the terms “man” and “woman” to convey the uniqueness that one has vis a vis the other is a trifecta, a "three legged table" of purpose, design and role: men and women have, respectively, a unique purpose, and from there a unique design to express that purpose, and from there a perogative for unique space in the culture to express that purpose according to their design.  Remove any part of that trifecta and there is no reason for the other two aspects of the trifecta of purpose, design and role to have meaning.

While a Leftist may allow the terms men and women for the sake of convenience, from an ontological standpoint, the Left does not believe that men and women actually exist in the full meaning of these terms, rather only biological human males, females, and hermaphrodites having different bodies, chromosomes and genitalia. Any favored expression of sexual differences above biology is merely the imposition of a cultural artifice that gives one form of sexual expression the false dominance of normalcy over other forms of sexual expression, giving one set of biologically different human creatures the power to oppress another set of biologically different human creatures.  

So that is why the Left is not simply interested adding "lesbian", "gay", "bi-sexual", "trans-gendered" ... to the already existing terms “men” and “women”, but in coming with their own alternative terms to codify their diametrically opposed view of the world in regard to gender and sexuality, a worldview that rejects the binary of sexuality into man and woman. 

One of their terms, “hetero-normal” is intended to convey the idea that being a “man” is merely a normative lifestyle choice for the biological human male to conform to among other lifestyles. Complimenting “hetero-normal” is “cis” as the term to describe someone who identifies the sex they were born with.  So a man is no longer merely a “man” but a “male cis hetero-normal”.   And then you have the movement to promote "ze" instead of "he" and "she". 

The long-game of this Leftist word play is to enable the sexual "individualist" to come out from under sexual "conformity" imposed by the terms "man" and "woman", and to remove the stigma for those who do not feel/believe that they are either a man or a woman.  In reality, these "alternative" terms are not so much in the business of removing stigma, but re-distributing it in favor of Leftism.  These terms serve a social engineering effort to remove social stigma from those who do not feel that they are either fully man or woman and place stigma on those who value the terms man or woman enough to require the cultural space needed for these terms to have meaning.

There is no room in the long run for both a Leftist concept and a Biblical concept of sexuality and gender to co-exist and co-habitate.  We will either operate under the conformity to the ideas of "man" and "woman" or the alternative conformity of sexuality and gender splintered to a host of non-binary terms. 

Either the Left is promoting freedom and justice, liberating people into what is truly natural, or it is keeping people from being redeemed into what C.S. Lewis would describe as the "arch-natural", what is truly natural as God designed us to be. 

People do not set out to be evil, but rather walk backwards into being evil, often because they believe that they are doing the right thing, passionately.  As one who affirms Scripture, I assert that the Left is engaged in evil, promoting sexual confusion by believing that it is promoting justice.